Lessons from Clinton: W. can learn

On March 26, the New York Times published a story headlined "Some Say U.S. Lags in Blocking Foot-and-Mouth Disease at the Border." The paper reported that many experts fear the Department of Agriculture "has nothing close to the resources it needs to protect America's 170 million cattle, sheep, and pigs" from the disease ravaging livestock in Great Britain. "Quite frankly, the department needs much more resources at all borders," Dan Glickman, the Clinton-administration agriculture secretary, told the Times, "and the White House needs to think about this as a threat to our national economic security."

In a more recent conversation, Glickman, now a lawyer with a large Washington firm, was less critical of the administration's performance. "Ann Veneman and her team are doing a good job substantively," he said of his successor at Agriculture. "On the substance, the cabinet-level departments are doing fine." But even though the Bush administration, in Glickman's view, is doing the right things on the foot-and-mouth issue, it has missed an opportunity to tell the world about it. "If this had been during the Clinton administration, we probably would have had an active interagency process with an active communications strategy to it," Glickman said. In plain terms, that means the Clinton White House would have turned a potential problem into a political payoff.

How would the former president have done it? First, he would have convened a high-level meeting to dramatize the foot-and-mouth threat. "That would have gotten some press," says Rahm Emanuel, the former White House senior adviser who took part in many such events. "We would have gotten a spray [meaning, television coverage] of the meeting with the secretary of agriculture, the head of HHS, and it would have looked like we were ahead of the curve." Then, with cameras rolling, Clinton would have informed Americans of the steps he was taking to protect them. Finally-privately-the president's pollsters would have measured the political benefit of the latest White House initiative.

In contrast, the Bush administration's reaction stressed substance and ignored politics. While that's hard to question from a governing standpoint, the same could be said of other issues-arsenic in water, salmonella in meat, carbon-dioxide emissions-in which the administration made reasonable decisions only to endure a torrent of politically damaging criticism. The problem has led to the beginnings of a debate on whether the White House should take a new approach to the salesmanship and political theater involved in building support for potentially controversial positions. More specifically, it has raised the question of whether the new president should take a lesson from his predecessor.

Start with arsenic. In his final days in office, Clinton signed an order imposing a new and dramatically lower federal standard for the presence of arsenic in the water supply. The outgoing president's action left Bush in a bind: He could do nothing, in which case the Clinton rule would take effect on its own, or he could throw out Clinton's action altogether. He chose the latter course and set off a predictable storm of criticism from Democrats who accused the White House of plotting to poison the nation's drinking water.

Administration officials tried to explain that the proposed Clinton standard was unrealistic. They tried to explain that a certain amount of arsenic is always in the water. They tried to explain that the arsenic standard had been the same for nearly 60 years-including all the years of the Clinton administration. These arguments were no doubt effective with those who form their opinions on the basis of reason; but they bombed with the large group of voters who evaluate issues on the basis of fear.

"How do we explain the Clinton arsenic rule?" asks Fred Smith, the head of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute and occasional adviser to the White House on regulatory matters. "Say it wasn't based on sound science? That it wasn't a logical thing to do? Fine, but what about the people who feel vulnerable?" The question is especially critical in the area of public health and safety, where Democrats in Congress speak an intricately contrived language of caring and protection and security. "The Bush administration hasn't fleshed compassionate conservatism out enough to find ways to talk about environmental safety issues in ways that resonate with people who care about those issues," Smith says.

From his vantage point in Chicago, where he is now an investment banker, Rahm Emanuel was baffled by the arsenic episode. It wasn't Bush's policy decision-Emanuel concedes there wasn't anything terribly wrong with that. It was that the administration handled the politics of the issue so badly. "It just doesn't make sense," says Emanuel. "I would have said that what we have on the books today is unacceptable, but what the Clinton administration did at the last minute is also wrong-and in three months we'll have a number that is right."